The Wonderful Adventures of Nils eBook

Thus it happened that all the grown-ups who had come
to watch the children took part in the work.
Then, of course, it became greater fun than before.
By and by the children had even more help. Other
implements were needed, so a couple of long-legged
boys were sent down to the village for spades and
hoes. As they ran past the cabins, the stay-at-homes
came out and asked: “What’s wrong?
Has there been an accident?”

“No, indeed! But the whole parish is up
on the fire-swept mountain planting a forest.”

“If the whole parish is there, we can’t
stay at home!”

So party after party of peasants went crowding to
the top of the burnt mountain. They stood a moment
and looked on. The temptation to join the workers
was irresistible.

“It’s a pleasure to sow one’s own
acres in the spring, and to think of the grain that
will spring up from the earth, but this work is even
more alluring,” they thought.

Not only slender blades would come from that sowing,
but mighty trees with tall trunks and sturdy branches.
It meant giving birth not merely to a summer’s
grain, but to many years’ growths. It meant
the awakening hum of insects, the song of the thrush,
the play of grouse and all kinds of life on the desolate
mountain. Moreover, it was like raising a memorial
for coming generations. They could have left a
bare, treeless height as a heritage. Instead
they were to leave a glorious forest.

Coming generations would know their forefathers had
been a good and wise folk and they would remember
them with reverence and gratitude.

A DAY IN HAeLSINGLAND

A LARGE GREEN LEAF

Thursday, June sixteenth.

The following day the boy travelled over Haelsingland.
It spread beneath him with new, pale-green shoots
on the pine trees, new birch leaves in the groves,
new green grass in the meadows, and sprouting grain
in the fields. It was a mountainous country,
but directly through it ran a broad, light valley
from either side of which branched other valleys—­some
short and narrow, some broad and long.

“This land resembles a leaf,” thought
the boy, “for it’s as green as a leaf,
and the valleys subdivide it in about the same way
as the veins of a leaf are foliated.”

The branch valleys, like the main one, were filled
with lakes, rivers, farms, and villages. They
snuggled, light and smiling, between the dark mountains
until they were gradually squeezed together by the
hills. There they were so narrow that they could
not hold more than a little brook.

On the high land between the valleys there were pine
forests which had no even ground to grow upon.
There were mountains standing all about, and the forest
covered the whole, like a woolly hide stretched over
a bony body.

It was a picturesque country to look down upon, and
the boy saw a good deal of it, because the eagle was
trying to find the old fiddler, Clement Larsson, and
flew from ravine to ravine looking for him.